Biosphere and development

Environmental Semantics for Sustainable Development in an Interconnected Biosphere

Development unavoidably impacts the ecosystems constituting Earth’s biosphere, often producing complex outcomes across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The interconnectivity of global ecosystems and their varied responses to disturbance necessitate great caution when using or encountering terms such as “sustainable” and “sustainability”. The Environment Ontology (ENVO; www.environmentont...

Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve (Biscay, Spain): Conservation against development?

The protected area approach has extended from conserving biodiversity to improving human well-being. However, the relationship between conservation and socioeconomic and cultural development continues to be controversial. This paper combines land use variables with socioeconomic and cultural variables through multivariate ordination analysis and evaluates their evolution in two areas inside and...

Early Biosphere: Origin and Evolution

We argue that the process of the origin and evolution of living organisms is indivisible from the process of the origin and evolution of biosphere, the global planetary system. The most general features of biosphere evolution as a directed process are formulated in the principle of “bio-actualism”. It is demonstrated, that this principle, stated for Phanerozoic eon, hold for early biosphere up ...

Biosphere feedbacks and climate change

POLICY ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE IS INFORMED BY CLIMATE MODEL projections as described most recently in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The models used are general circulation models (GCMs), which numerically represent the physical climate system in three dimensions, including the hydrological cycle. These are complemented by recently de...

Models of Biosphere Processes